Name your dog Muhammad

The Sudanese government released Gillian Gibbons, who was imprisoned for allowing her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad. If it weren't for British intervention, she might have gotten 40 lashes or even faced the death penalty. I guess it offends Muslims when inanimate objects are named Muhammad.

Which is why I now name pretty much everything Muhammad. I named my bike Muhammad, and my favorite rocking chair. And my laptop. I just wish I had a teddy bear. Oh well, maybe Santa will bring me one for Christmas. (Some brave person should sell "Muhammad" teddy bears. She'd probably make a fortune before getting beheaded.)

But the best thing to name Muhammad is a dog.

Muhammad didn't like dogs much. He thought that they were dirty and evil (black ones especially). He said that angels refuse to enter a house if there's dog a inside, and that whatever good deeds a person might do are undone by owning a dog.

So do a good deed that can't be undone. Name your dog Muhammad. (I think I will, if I can talk my wife into letting me have one.)

Would Jesus Stone Larry Craig?

Someone should ask Mike Huckabee.

Because in last week's YouTube debate, Huckabee said this when asked if he believed in every word of the Bible:

Sure I believe that the Bible is exactly what it is. It's the word of revelation to us from God Himself. And the fact is that when people ask do we believe all of it, you either believe it or you don't believe it.

Well, then, here's what the Bible says about about Larry Craig.

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:13

So according to Mike Huckabee this commandment is the "revelation to us from God himself" and "you either believe it or you don't believe it."

Huckabee claims to believe it. The question is, would he do it? Would he stone Larry Craig (assuming the recent stories about him are true)?

The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses

Not all of the nine on Cracked.com's list would make it onto mine, but then there are so many badass verses to choose from. Here are some that we can all agree on.

(The first number is the Cracked.com Badass rating; the second is the ranking at TopVerses.com. Believers just don't seem to like these verses much.)

#8 (15,995) 2 Kings 2:23-24

Okay, we've seen this one before. But isn't this a great picture?

And, of course, here's the moral of the story.

#7 (16,648) Ezekiel 23:19-20
No comment is needed on this one.

#4 (26,550)Deuteronomy 25:11-12

The Cracked.com authors (Wong and Ball) explain it this way.

Now, you nervous, liberal types are complaining that this is barbaric and misogynistic. Perhaps, a little context helps. Just a couple of pages earlier, in Deuteronomy 23:1, we get this:

"Emasculated by crushing?" Gah! Everything in the Bible has to be understood in context of the times these people were living in. And, apparently, these people lived in a time when "crushing" the nuts was so common that the crushed-nuts victims were an entire demographic that had to be accounted for in the law. Call these commandments savage if you want, but if you were God, how many nuts would you have to see "crushed" before you overreacted? We're thinking the answer is two.

#1 (8,876) 1 Samuel 18:25-27
This is my personal favorite.

And here's some of Ball and Wong's exegesis.

This passage raises several thousand questions. Just off the top of our head:

What did Saul (the king at the time) want with 100 foreskins? Was he going to make a scarf?

Did David think this was a strange request?

If this was secretly a plan to have David killed, why didn't he require he bring back, say, 100 bear foreskins?

Did David just wander into Philistia and kill the first 200 men he saw? Did they think this was odd? Or, with all the other shit that went down back then, did they just shrug it off?

...

We're guessing we'll never know. It doesn't matter, because at its heart, this story is about love. For the hand of Micah, David went further than any man would have gone. Way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way further.

Ladies, when a man finally proposes to you, ask him one simple question: "How many dongs would you mutilate for me?" If you demand a hundred and he doesn't blink, he's a keeper. But, if he's David, who was sent after a hundred and then came back with twice that many just for the hell of it, well, you've got a love for the ages.

Which verses are on your list?

Losing the Lamanites

The LDS church is changing a single word in its introduction to the Book of Mormon.

If you go get your Book of Mormon (or go to LDS.com) you'll find the following words in the last sentence of the second paragraph: "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians."

But the new version will say, "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians."

Now if you haven't read the Book of Mormon, this might not seem like such a big deal to you. But the idea that Native Americans are the degenerate offspring of the Lamanite tribe is absolutely central to the Book of Mormon. In fact, other than Jesus showing up now and then in the New World, there just isn't much else to the silliest book every written.

So why did the leaders of the Mormon church drop the teaching about the Lamanites?

Because they had to.

Of course, anthropologists known for many years that Native Americans migrated from Asia thousands of years ago, long before the Jaredites and the Nephites supposedly made their incredible journeys. But recent DNA evidence makes it impossible to deny any longer. The Book of Mormon is wrong; Native Americans did not descend from the Lamanites.

That is what the LDS church is admitting with the 1-word change in the introduction to the Book of Mormon.

Most Popular Bible Verses (Jeremiah 19:9 didn't make the list)

What a great idea, eh? Take the 31,101 or so verses in the Bible and rank them by popularity. That's what TopVerses.com did, and guess what verse was number one.

That's right.

But none of my favorite verses made it on the top 10 or even the top 1000 verses. (Although Malachi 2:3 was the 9th most popular verse in Malachi and the top verse in Malachi 2.)

I guess there are some verses that Bible believers just don't like very much. Take Jeremiah 19:9, for example.

And I [God] will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend.

This is clearly a verse that God feels strongly about. Yet it's ranked 21,875!

I'll bet that really ticks God off. (Maybe he'll force believers to eat each other.)